1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to creating and editing business models and, more particularly, to a system and method using a pre-defined internal meta-model to classify business activities into several types of management components and govern all types of business operations. The invention provides a general model driven translation approach that can facilitate code re-use and yet enforce a built-in validation capability.
2. Background Description
As eXtensible Markup Language (XML) formats have been widely adopted for representing business documents both within and across enterprises, XML to XML translation becomes a common and critical component for business process integration. Script-based approaches usually include a fixed translator, and translation methods are coded inside style sheets or annotated schemas. Document Object Model (DOM) tree-based approaches provide fixed sets of tree traversal Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for developers to program the translators. However, there are limitations for these approaches.
The XML Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) approach can not guarantee that the translated XML documents will conform to a complicated schema, thus requiring an extra validation stage. Other approaches may require designing a complicated code re-using utility to alleviate programming effort and for better coping with future schema upgrades. There is a great need for a general model driven translation approach that can facilitate code re-use and yet enforce a built-in validation capability.